Cold Stone & Ivy Book 2: The Crown Prince (The Empire of Steam)

by H. Leighton Dickson

  Where Ghostlight was taking Ivy.

  “Remy!” she cried again.

  The Emperor’s arms were suddenly around her waist, but even together they slid across the floor. Christien joined them, using his body as a shield but the pull was unstoppable and the three of them were dragged closer and closer yet to the massive orb.

  “Let it go, Ivy!” Christien shouted over the roar of the winds. “That’s what it wants!”

  “No!” she shouted back. “Sebastien needs it!”

  “He needs you alive, that’s what he needs! Let it go!”

  Roses whipped past her head, cutting her cheeks with a hundred tiny thorns. Even the Kaiser was being sucked into the room, he and Gisela clutching the doorframes to keep themselves aright. Valerie was behind a pew but its anchor bolts were rattling loose in the vacuum. The casket itself was bumping and sliding and inside it, Sisi held the body of her son to her chest. Even her tears were snatched from her eyes to disappear into the vortex above the altar.

  Swiftly, Ivy nodded and the blade sprang up from Christien’s clockwork hand, snapping the chain in an instant. Ghostlight flew like a shot into the heart of the orb, disappearing like a coin down a dark well. Immediately, the engine ceased and the wind died and there was silence for a brief moment in the Court Chapel.

  With a rumble, the great black orb folded up on itself and disappeared, sucking the entire altar with it.

  Leaving two figures where the altar had been. One staggered, losing sparks and springs before collapsing to the floor in a shower of smoke; the other dropping to hands and knees, greatcoat trailing soot like a shadow.

  ***

  Outside, in the Chapel Commons, there were no mourners left. Rather, the Swiss Guard streamed out in double rows, rifles and bayonets at the ready. Hussars – human and silver – joined them until the entire courtyard was filled with soldiers, the Swiss flanking the walls and steps of the chapel, the Hussars surrounding the massive trackwheels of the Eisenmänner. High above, the cannons had fallen silent and there was only the creak of hulls and flap of canvas as Claw and Maiden circled each other, the others drifting just out of reach. Later that day, the papers would call it a monumental display of technology and weaponry and international support, put on for the eve of the Crown Prince’s funeral. Only those inside the chapel would ever know the truth.

  Where the altar used to be, a woman struggled, arms flailing, crinoline hissing with steam and hydraulics. As if in a trance, the Empress rose slowly from the casket, moved slowly to her daughter’s side, slowly helped her to sit. It seemed like ages before Ivy realized that the woman with the iron corset and baby-blonde curls was Sophie. Her signature mask was gone and Sisi ran her hands over her daughter’s face, kissed her forehead, smoothed her curls.

  Either the most beautiful woman in the Empire…

  Slowly herself, she turned her eyes to the second figure. She did not recognize what she saw.

  “Was zum Teufel?” said the Kaiser.

  “Oh god,” breathed Christien.

  On his knees, Sebastien looked like a crumbling statue, unmoving and weathered. Soot rained like plaster from his fair hair, from his mouth, from his eyes. His greatcoat was tattered and the blanket wrapped his shoulders like a cowl, but they like his face, like his skin, were grey. Around his neck, Arclight, glittering and spinning and wicked.

  In his right hand, Ghostlight.

  “Ivy, don’t,” said Christien. “Don’t touch him.”

  But there was only one person in her entire world and she picked her way over the rubble toward him. When her heart should be leaping, she found it was cold and she wondered if she was dead too as she sank down to her knees before him. Slowly, he looked up at her, his eyes black as night, no stars, no suns, only the great, empty void of space.

  “Please,” said Christien. “Just don’t touch him.”

  She nodded. She had no strength to do anything else.

  And the chapel was filled with infant laughter.

  “Where is your mask?” asked Sisi.

  “Gone,” Sophie sang. “Gone, gone, gone, gone…”

  “But you must wear your mask. Your face—”

  “Is my face, Maman. There are no more masks. Not for me. I will enter my death with my face. My own face.”

  “Ivy,” gasped Sebastien. His voice sounded a thousand miles away.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. She didn’t know where they came from. Couldn’t feel them at all.

  “I can’t breathe…Ivy.”

  She nodded.

  “And the horse is coming.”

  It was obvious he was having difficulty speaking. Lack of breathing would do that, she reckoned.

  “I know…why I couldn’t see…the Crown Prince.”

  “He wasn’t murdered,” she said quietly. “He killed himself.”

  “Yes…with Sophie’s help.”

  “Sophie?”

  “Was?” said the Emperor.

  “Sophie?” asked the Empress.

  Sitting only a few feet away, Sophie von Habsburg clapped her clockwork hands.

  “Oh Maman, you would have loved it,” she said in her sing-song voice. “He was so miserable. He had just killed Mary and he was despondent.”

  “I saw it…in the orb,” said Sebastien. “He carried her…up to the room…laid her on the bed.”

  “With a rose!” Sophie sighed. “A single, long-stemmed rose. How utterly, beautifully macabre.”

  Everyone was looking at her as she struggled to her feet. Ivy couldn’t tear her eyes away – the infant face, the tiny mouth, the baby curls. All else was wrapped in cable or iron. Fashionably wrapped, so as not to give the impression of full automation, but she could not help but wonder if the little girl’s body was contained within all that clockwork or if only the head and neck remained.

  Utterly, beautifully macabre.

  “I joined him beside the bed and we talked. Oh we talked for hours and hours about death and dying and the joy it brings. We had been talking for months about it. Oh yes, we had been talking for years. But now he was ready,” she nodded seriously. “Ready to take that last, best step beyond.”

  Franz Joseph moved closer, as did Gisela and Valerie. Christien had resumed his work on the body and Wilhelm circled like a crow, watching all with his feral gaze.

  “But he was frightened, you see? Even the whore Mitzi Caspar would not help him. Mary said she would but Mary lies. Mary wanted the locket for Wales, like Gigi wanted the locket for Willie.”

  “The girl was dead when I got there,” said Gisela. “And the Germans were waiting in the forest. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to Rudy, not after all that had happened that night…”

  It always came down to ‘that night.’

  “But I helped him,” sang Sophie in her little girl voice. “I told him that he didn’t have to be the Crown Prince anymore, not when the true Crown Prince was in Vienna. All empires were coming to an end and death for all the world was upon us. We would embrace it together. We sat beside the bed, I gave him my pistol and he gave me his.”

  She reached into her skirts, pulled out an iron cast in the twin eagles of the House of Habsburg. She waved it wildly and her sisters stepped back. Her parents did not.

  “And so he did it. I gave him his morphine and he shot himself in the head. Blood sprayed on my face. It was beautiful, like a painting. Like art. I have never been so proud in all my life.”

  She laughed. It was the tinkling of bells but no one else joined the music.

  “You are a coward,” said Wilhelm.

  All eyes turned in the direction of the Kaiser of Blood and Iron.

  “You didn’t do it,” snapped Wilhelm. “You didn’t shoot yourself. Rudolf is dead but you are very much alive, you little machine-girl. You lied to him!”

  “Silly man! I wasn’t lying. I knew that with him in the city, so many more could join us as well!”

  And she pointed her finger at the Mad Lord of Lasingstoke.

/>   “The end of the world is here. We are simply waiting for the last horse!”

  From his place over the body, Christien looked up.

  “Horse?” he asked.

  “You are all cowards,” said Wilhelm and he swaggered towards them. “And he doesn’t look like the Crown Prince of anything. He looks like a dead man!”

  He leaned over Sebastien, eyes flicking from Ghostlight to Arclight. Both were swinging sweetly, happy to be home.

  “And what does a dead man need with such pretty things?”

  “Go away,” growled Ivy.

  “What? Or you’ll turn me to gold?” He snorted. “You can’t control those lockets anymore than he can. They are the future of Blood and Iron.”

  And he reached his arm across the Mad Lord, fingers stretching to brush the glass, the silent rings.

  “Good lord, you people!” snapped Christien. “I said don’t touch him!”

  Ivy slapped his hand away.

  With a snarl, the Kaiser grabbed Sebastien’s arm to pull him back but he froze, eyes bulging, mouth gaping open, wide, wider. The scream wouldn’t come.

  The man staggered back, sinking to his knees and clutching his left arm. It was nothing but a withered stump, the fingers shriveled, the wrist twisted, the flesh dried like jerky. And still there was no scream, just bulging eyes and ragged breath and a rocking motion, back and forth, back and forth.

  And the sound of infant laughter filling the chapel.

  And someone else pounding on the chapel door.

  ***

  It was all too loud for him.

  “Mein herr! Sind sie gut? Öffnen Sie die Tür!”

  “Pappa?” asked Gisela. “The Hussars are at the door.”

  Far too loud and Sebastien rose to his feet,turned to the casket of the Gilded Crown Prince. He could see the bones inside his brother’s skin.

  “Remy?” asked Valerie.

  “Finished,” said Christien, climbing out of the casket and wiping his hands on his trousers. “Although I don’t think the wax they’ve used for his skull is going to keep. And as I’ve said before, he has no blood, no lymph, no fluids at all and his brain’s bound to be a bloody mess. Well, minus the blood.”

  Sebastien watched them all. It was like skulls talking. All he could see was the white of their bones.

  “If you’re hoping Bastien’s going to make this body come alive, be prepared for the fact that he will not live very long and if he does, he will not be even remotely the same. I would strongly advise against it.”

  And with that, he snatched up the medical bag, crossed the floor to kneel beside the still-rocking Kaiser of Blood and Iron.

  “I don’t care,” said Sisi. “I want my son back.”

  “I want my son,” Franz Joseph nodded. “If there is anything you can do, please do it.”

  The Mad Lord looked down at Ivy. She was battered and bruised, but if he concentrated, he could make out her face – her great green eyes, the freckles on her nose, the quirky, grinning mouth. Beneath the skin, the skull white as a cloud, the hollows black as the night. Red washing through tiny rivers, pink coiled like sand castles, sparks racing like firebugs through her brain. But at least, he could see her face.

  She tried to smile. It was thin, but still.

  “Life,” he said, his voice hollow and echoing. “When I look at you…I see life.”

  He offered her his hand.

  “Ivy, no!” hissed Christien.

  “I am Death but she…”

  She took it and he pulled her to her feet.

  “She is life.”

  He reached up a hand to touch her cheek. His fingers were rough but the touch of her skin was like fairy dust.

  “Do you mind?” he asked. “I do marvel…at the fact that…you’re real and very soft. Skin is…a remarkable thing, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, seemed unable to speak.

  “I’m not sure…how much longer I will have mine but…yours is like the fall…of fresh snow. You barely feel it at all…and your hair…”

  He plucked at a lock, ran it through thumb and forefinger, studying it as if it were a string of pearls. He could see the particles, spinning together far, far beneath.

  “It’s not like a horse or a dog…or anything else in my world. More like a rabbit or a feather…or a strand of spider silk…”

  She made poetry out of ordinary things.

  “Rupert… warned me about this,” he said. “He said…I was above such things but…I think he was quite wrong. I’m not…above you at all. You are as high above me…as a star above the earth.”

  “Kiss me please,” she said.

  He leaned in.

  “I…will be the death of you,” he said. He could feel her breath on his cheek. “And I won’t be able to follow.”

  “Then I shall live at Seventh and haunt you forever.”

  She closed her eyes as he kissed her.

  Like twin engines, Ghostlight and Arclight began to hum, their rings spinning in opposite directions and colours flashed across the room. Orbs sprang into life along with the colours, turning the chapel into a dizzying carnival of light.

  It was beautiful.

  She slipped her hand in his but gasped as sparks leapt from twin bands on her thumbs.

  “Oh, wait.”

  She slipped two rings from her hands, held them up to gleam in the locket-light.

  “Rudolf’s wedding ring,” she said. “And Mary’s. I don’t know if you need them but we went to a bucketful of trouble to fetch them, so I’d be pleased if you did.”

  He so wanted to kiss her again.

  Instead, he took the rings in one hand, clutched Ghostlight in the other and the room began to hum once more. Together, they turned to the casket.

  Christien had closed up the uniform and the Crown Prince looked as if asleep.

  “No,” wheezed Sophie. “No, do not do this. Rudy does not want this.”

  Sebastien closed his eyes. The voices in the chapel began to fade as the dead moved aside for his mind.

  “No, Maman. Make him stop!”

  “Sophie, hush,” said Sisi.

  The frost whirled and congealed, slowly, reluctantly becoming a man in white uniform.

  “No!” wailed Sophie. “This is not the way! I want my death back! Our father took it from me and I want it back!”

  “Sophie!” snapped her father. “Schäm dich!”

  “No! I want it back. He is the Crown Prince of Death! Our father made him for me but he needs to accept the crown. He must accept the crown!”

  She raised the holy Habsburg pistol and fired.

  Chapter 26

  Of the Death of Life, the Death of Death and the Arrival of the Last Horse

  “Life,” he had said. “When I look at you, I see life.”

  The sound of his voice, echoing through time, deep and ageless and free. At the touch of his hand, sparks and colours, warmth and light, cold and absolute utter blackness. And his kiss. It was perfect, like the kisses in all the stories and fairy-tales and novels she had ever read. The Brontë sisters couldn’t have written a better kiss. Not clever Jane Austen either nor lyrical Elizabeth Barrett nor wild Thomas Hardy. She found herself breathing him as easily as a summer evening, ethereal and deep and she wished to write her own prose on his tongue.

  He was beautiful – a creature not of this earth and she loved him with more than her heart, with everything that she was. It wasn’t enough, not for him, but it was all she had and it was pretty good for a girl from Stepney.

  She was a good girl from Stepney and she loved a Mad Lord from Lasingstoke and she would love him until the day she died. And for the rest of her life after that, she had promised.

  But there was a sound.

  Loud and barking like the crack of thunder.

  Then there was the force – a shock, an impact and it hit her ribs, lifting her off her feet like a charging bull or a flipping steamcar. Dimly she was aware of flying, then of not flying, of roses and
thorns and a face like porcelain, with pale skin and clear blue eyes and dark hair falling into them.

  “Christien,” she said but there was a sharp taste on her tongue and bitter and she tried to spit it out but more came with the effort.

  There was heat, crashing over her like a wave of hot oil.

  And then the pain.

  ***

  Damn if it didn’t sound like a pistol.

  The veil was tearing once again, the veil between death and life, hammering nails into his brain. It was the same as the night behind Dutfield’s Yard when Elizabeth Stride had died not fifty feet away, a victim of his father’s fury and his brother’s blade. Now, Sebastien could hear voices at the periphery of his mind but he was so deep in the deadspace and Rudolf just a heartbeat away. He could see the sadness in the man’s eyes, even more poignant than the missing pieces of his skull. Sophie had been right. He didn’t want to come back.

  “Bastien!”

  Ghostlight was flashing, sending snowflakes to the ceiling. Arclight was spinning, raining sparks to the floor. Standing before him, ghostly and pale, the Crown Prince of Austro-Hungary reluctantly offered his white-gloved hand and stepped toward him through the void and the stars. It would be a feat to reunite him with his body, both broken and embalmed. He had never done such a thing. He had never done it, but then again, he had never tried.

  “Bastien!”

  Christien’s voice pierced the deadspace, causing it to ripple like a pebble in a pond.

  “Bastien!”

  He tore his eyes away. They didn’t work well in this world. Figures were skeletons and tendons, muscle and organ. It took all of his effort to see his brother as his brother, and more than that, to see him kneeling over another figure on the black-carpeted floor, bloody hands clutching his sleeve.

  There was a woman.

  “Bastien! I need your help!”